


(Death) For My Birthday

by clytemnestras



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-19
Updated: 2015-11-19
Packaged: 2018-05-02 10:37:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5245151
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>dawn is the tardis</p>
            </blockquote>





	(Death) For My Birthday

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nereid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nereid/gifts).



They can do so many things, these days. Whatever time the universe is spiralling through, those hands outside of it, reaching past the outlines and twisting into obscurity.  
  
Weaving moonlight between their fingers, plucking hearts out of chests and sewing them into stars.  
  
They can make a girl from a key. They can make a machine from a girl. It's all logistics.  
  
*  
  
Dawn falls asleep in English.  
  
*  
  
She is dreaming, maybe, of time passing through her like sand through fingers, clinging to her insides as she dusts herself off. She is real, or she isn't, the difference is nominal.  
  
There is a boy.  
  
(There's always a boy, apart from when there is a girl. Sometimes both and neither tangle. There's always a someone, anyway.)  
  
He's a fairy story. She never cared much for those. But he touches her - God. He says things in her ear like nothing matters, like she is a gift to the universe that he intends to covet.  
  
She takes him away to keep somewhere safe. Safe, meaning where other people can't ruin him. She wants to ruin him all on her own.  
  
*  
  
Dawn wakes up in math class with a novel on her arm and writing in circles like obituaries smattering her thighs.  
  
Dawn sleeps a lot, these days.  
  
*  
  
She let's him drift.  
  
She let's him pick up people and pull them apart for loving them so and doesn't care a moment.  
  
(That's not to say she doesn't have favourites. She has favourites. Leela is an archetype of something that sits heavy in her chest, and Ace is a brat in that beautiful way only broken girls can be.  
  
Romana is a tempest spread so thinly she hardly sparks except for when she's ruinous. She's that one - the favourite. It's a shame she's his, too.)  
  
He picks up strays and trails them along with him and she forgets to shed tears when they drop like feathers.  
  
Icarus never did fly for long.  
  
Then he breaks, inside. He hurts in ways she can't soothe with adventure or comfort or long nights in the dust.  
  
So she does what she can.  
  
*  
  
Dawn writes stories, sometimes. A stolen laptop when Buffy's not looking. Distractions by pulled threads in cashmere sweaters and smoke alarm-sounding fish sticks.  
  
Dawn writes stories about a boy and a girl, except neither are really that at all.  
  
Dawn writes a love story, then throws it in the trash.  
  
*  
  
She brings him flowers.  
  
She brings him earth and the people he has been so close to, draws closest to his breast when she ducks her head.  
  
She brings him Rose.  
  
She drops him at the feet of a girl with universe eyes and wolfblood. She brings him what she wishes someone would bring to her.  
  
He forgets to thank her until it's too late, but that's neither here nor there.  
  
*  
  
Dawn kisses Janice on the mall steps, tipping their faces together and tasting like snowcones and lip gloss.  
  
Dawn sees flashes of gold when her fingers tangle in Janice's hair. Doesn't mention it, though.  
  
*  
  
She throws him at Martha with a headlong thrust.  
  
She traipses around the lovesick fingerprints he leaves on her insides and she finds him another girl who he can't possibly break.  
  
He manages, somehow.  
  
She tells Martha things, though, when she's sleeping and he's off doing what he does.  
  
She tells her she deserves the stars, and someday the universe will give them to her.  
  
She'll make it.  
  
*  
  
Dawn falls asleep in the bath. Dawn slides under and then there are hands on her chest and water spilling up her throat and for a moment Dawn is as big as the room and spreading further outward, as far as she can reach.  
  
Then Buffy is pulling at her shoulders and screaming, "Not her. Not again, fuck."  
  
And then Dawn is as small as her body, if ever she is that.  
  
*  
  
Donna happens.  
  
It's perhaps her favourite accident.  
  
She does everything possible to give Donna what she needs, give her hope and love and it isn't him that destroys her, but she becomes destroyed anyway.  
  
She thinks Donna might be the laughter and care she was searching for, before she lost herself to this.  
  
They weep together, her holding him up, keeping him solid underneath her fingers.  
  
*  
  
Dawn goes to funerals like dogs go to the pound.  
  
Dawn never really expects to leave, carries the ghosts inside her like a cemetery.  
  
Dawn perhaps mourns more people than she knows, but it never seems like too many.  
  
When they get the call about Cordelia, Dawn sets her fairytale books on fire - knowing that if princesses with knifeblades don't get happy endings, nobody does.  
  
*  
  
He is an  _idiot._  
  
She throws him into the arms of a little girl with the grace of dead gods and he wrecks her with a kiss on the cheek returned twelve years late.  
  
She lets Amy love him, love her. She lets the stars fall in love with themselves, thinking maybe they might save what they both so wonderfully ruined.  
  
He's Tinkerbelle to Amy's Peter, makes her as fae as him, and Amy makes him as her.  
  
She might ruin them both, might make them both something other than themselves. She doesn't mean to. Love is as it is.  
  
*  
  
Dawn falls in love as in dreaming. Dawn's eyes are tired and her hands are sleep-soft and Dawn drags her fingers down the length of Janice's skin and wonders how people are made and how they fit and break into each other.  
  
Dawn is so old.  
  
Dawn is new, and dangerous and terriblewonderful and Janice kisses her anyway.  
  
*  
  
Rory is a bigger accident.  
  
He's nothing she ever wanted and everything she needed and is not her favourite, but could be if he asked.  
  
He soothes the wounds of them, all three of them. He kisses Amy and cuddles The Doctor and he talks to her in the silence, like he knows how being endless feels, and knows what love can shatter.  
  
She wants more for them. She has no idea how to give it.  
  
She kisses their cheeks when the stars burn out.  
  
*  
  
The world opens under Dawn's feet and scripture can't save her, though swords might.  
  
Girls die in Dawn's arms as the nights roll on, more so as they all drive away.  
  
The town falls to dust, and somehow Dawn goes on. There will be other mouths for Dawn to kiss lipstick off of, other short skirts to steal. Dawn will not get another sister, though, and she sits in the school bus with Faith in one hand and Buffy in the other and forgets to wonder what is or is not real.  
  
None of it ever has been, and yet they stay breathing.  
  
*  
  
She thinks about, sometimes, opening up and swallowing him.  
  
She is more monster than he is man, but these things get forgotten. Life and death weave through her ribcage, she has always been a bigger threat than her body.  
  
River is hers, in that way. In lots of others.  
  
She writes herself a runaway as a gift - it’s confused that they both think that gift is for him. Forgetting she has no fingers, no mouth to spread kisses with, she gives herself a gift and then lets her slip straight from her fingers.  
  
When River happens in confused fits and starts, she promises herself to eat him alive - and never quite works out if it’s something she makes good on.  
  
*  
  
Dawn’s job is a shitfest. No one likes (or asks for) the edits, and they cut her to pieces on artistic integrity. Fuck them.  
  
A hipster with a soul patch tells Dawn she knows nothing of pain or the human condition when his poem is slid back across the desk and run through with red. And if Dawn eats out his girlfriend on top of his silk sheets, well.  
  
It’s an occupational hazard.  
  
*  
  
Clara is a girl made from nothing and soul.  
  
She can relate.  
  
They sit side by side when he’s wrapped up in Clara’s enigma, trying so hard to work out how a girl can split in a thousand different ways, made from something utterly outside herself, and still bleed red.  
  
Clara reads to her, aloud and soft in the spacely silence. She reads to Clara too, and is sure, somehow, somewhere, Clara can hear her.  
  
*  
  
Dawn might die when she’s 27, in a car crash in New York.  
  
Then, maybe Dawn dies drowning in the bath when she is barely 17.  
  
Maybe Dawn was never even living at all.  
  
But there’s a second in between her breaths where she falls asleep - where her chest bursts open, clean and golden-green. She holds the universe inside herself, as a girl, as a ball of light in the midst of nothing. Then the universe gives her back, older and newer and bigger than before.  
  
Dawn doesn’t like a single name they give her, after that. Not until he steps inside and calls her Sexy.


End file.
